Filipina Soul

image used with permission: Flickr

What was the first thing in your mind when you saw this image?

Poverty? Yes, obviously. It’s a family in the middle of what could only be a squatter site backdropped with high-rise buildings. Trash all around, and maybe it’s a dumpsite too. There’s a really tiny house/store and a bathroom made of corrugated metal to the side. Teenagers loitering around means they’re not in school, or maybe out of it, either by choice or out of luck.

Blog Action Day 2008 brings Poverty in focus, and the Philippines is a perfect case study. Filipino bloggers are banding together to write about poverty and hopefully make some concrete headway with the issue.

But when I look at the image above, I see beyond merely poverty.

I see a family that is struggling to make ends meet, and yet with a sense of survival. The store is there, and that may not bring enough money in with neighbors just like them. But it’s there, it’s a means. There is a cat, maybe as destitute as they are, but hey there is a pet. I don’t see hopelessness. Rather I see survival, resilience, adaptability.

I’m not trivializing the issue of economic poverty, but I realize it’s not the absence of material security that makes us truly poor. As the proverb goes, “Mabuti pa ang kubo, na nakatira ay tao kaysa mansiyon na nakatira ay kuwago. (A nipa hut where a person lives is better than a mansion lived in by an owl.) I have known people who live from meal to meal and yet they call themselves blessed. And I know friends who have more money than their children will ever spend but are so afraid of losing it they can’t even give to their own children. Yeah, we have Pinoy Scrooges around. Corruption and greed are so rampant. When a person lacks humanity and thinks money is all there is, then that man is poorer than the lot of us who have only change in our pocket. Pity that man.